Nagorno Karabakh

Armenians are seething over Russia’s possible role in the shoot-down of an Armenian helicopter near the frontlines in Nagorno Karabakh. Feelings of betrayal are such that the popular mood is souring on Armenia’s pending membership in a Moscow-led trade bloc.

Deadly skirmishes have erupted recently between Azerbaijani and Armenian forces over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh, with each side blaming the other for the escalation in violence. Here are answers to five central questions about the conflict.

Russia’s escalating confrontation with the West resulting from its annexation of Crimea has thrown long-running international efforts to end the conflict over Nagorno Karabakh into uncertainty. Analysts in Yerevan believe that the standoff bodes ill for continued joint US-Russian mediation of the Armenian-Azerbaijani peace talks, which is seen as critical for achieving a compromise settlement.

Nearly 20 years after a ceasefire brought a halt to all-out warfare in Nagorno-Karabakh, the Azerbaijani government is still grappling with the challenge of accommodating the country’s 600,000 Internally Displaced Persons, without encouraging them to forget their former homes.

When Mariam Avanesian and her family fled to Yerevan from Azerbaijan 25 years ago this month, they thought they were lucky; they had escaped physical danger, and left behind an apartment rather than “a grave” in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku. But moving to Armenia didn’t mean the end of uncertainty for Avanesian’s family members, and tens of thousands of others.

Survivors of a brutal conflict that presaged the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Armenian and Azerbaijani veterans of the 1988-1994 war over the disputed territory of Nagorno Karabakh actually hold one thing in common -- a fear that, nearly 20 years after the cease-fire, they are being forgot

Cash-rich Azerbaijan appears policy-poor when it comes to the thousands of veterans who fought in its 1988-1994 conflict with Armenia and ethnic Armenian separatists over the breakaway region of Nagorno Karabakh.

Successful in war, Armenian veterans of the 1988-1994 conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno Karabakh have been far less successful in securing the benefits they say they deserve from the Armenian government.